An artist’s Pilgrimage’: Annie Leibovitz opens new exhibit

As if recalling a healing journey, Annie Leibovitz launched her photographic “Pilgrimage” yesterday at the Concord Museum, introducing an exhibition of evocative images taken after great personal loss.

By Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA

By Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

Posted Jun. 28, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jun 28, 2012 at 10:29 PM

By Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

Posted Jun. 28, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jun 28, 2012 at 10:29 PM

CONCORD

» Social News

As if recalling a healing journey, Annie Leibovitz launched her photographic “Pilgrimage” yesterday at the Concord Museum, introducing an exhibition of evocative images taken after great personal loss.

The internationally acclaimed photographer best known for intimate celebrity portraits displayed in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair is showing 70 photographs in a striking traveling exhibition entitled “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage.”

The traveling exhibit was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Featuring nine photos taken in Concord, the exhibition of new work by an artist of Leibovitz’s stature represents a huge coup for the museum and Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, which collaborated on its presentation in Concord. It runs through Sept. 23.

Filling three second-story galleries, “Pilgrimage” comprises color photos taken between April 2009 and May 2011 in homes, studios and museums devoted to artists and luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keefe. It also includes photos taken during visits to Monticello, Graceland and Val-Kil, where Eleanor Roosevelt resided.

Opening the show yesterday morning, a relaxed Leibovitz said the genesis for a book of travel photographs began years ago in discussions with the late Susan Sontag, a brilliant essayist and dear friend. After Sontag’s death in 2004, Leibovitz said she lived through a period of professional and financial pressure that led to considerable stress and depression.

Revealing a dramatic departure from her meticulously staged portraits, the photographs in “Pilgrimage’’ are celebratory, capturing singular details and moments that reveal her absent subjects in profound, moving and sometimes wacky ways.

A photo in Orchard House of three early 19th century dolls that belonged to the Alcott sisters conjures images of the rich imaginative life of the family headed by offbeat scholar Bronson Alcott. A glass container of stuffed birds in a house associated with poet Emily Dickinson suggests the hermetic nature of her verse.

Sometimes joking, Leibovitz explained the photo of a television with a bullet hole in its screen, stored at Graceland, likely occurred because Elvis Presley often shot televised images of Robert Goulet.

Leibovitz described the photographs in “Pilgrimage’’ as “so not my kind of pictures.’’

“I don’t usually come in this close (to my subjects.) This is really a notebook. It’s a project about process,’’ she said. “…It’s a sort of quest in which I’m saying myself ‘Where do we go from here.’ “

The Concord Museum is located at 200 Lexington Road, Concord. For information, call 978-369-9763 or go to www.concordmuseum.org.